A pause, and then he spoke. But what language I couldn’t say. A harsh tongue, guttural, it seemed to sit on the edge of understanding. I caught one word that sounded like ‘alert’: he said it more than once.

‘Perhaps he speaks another language,’ I said. ‘I read that there were many tongues among the Builders, almost as many across the empire as there are kingdoms. And even if he speaks the empire tongue it may be that it has changed over the course of centuries. Things move on, nothing stands still, words least of all.’

Hemmet scowled at me but the anger didn’t last, a cloud across the sun. ‘You did this, you woke him up, brought the light back to the palace. And I won’t forget it, King Jorg.’ He set a hand to the Builder’s shoulder, then moved beside him, the arm around him, protective. ‘I will speak with the Custodian in private. Captain Kosson, afford our guests all possible courtesy and escort them from the palace when their needs have been met.’

And Hemmet left us, taking his saint with him.

I bent and scooped up the view-ring. ‘Well Father Merrin, you were right. Hemmet loves me now.’ I frowned. ‘I thought someone once told me … I thought I heard that you couldn’t tell a man his future because telling him changes it.’

Merrin smiled and turned those milky eyes on me. ‘It depends on the future, Jorg, and how much you tell them. My own visions are so hazy that there’s little detail to relate.’

‘So what else can you tell me about my future, Father?’ I stepped closer so what sight remained to him might capture me.

‘You don’t want to know, Jorg,’ he said. ‘The future is a dark place. We all die there.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

And, perhaps because he knew I would wear him down – that future being plain to both of us – he answered, ‘You will kill and kill again, do the darkest deeds, betray those you should love, destroy your brother, and lead ruin to us all.’

‘So, no real change then?’ I ignored the look on Elin’s face, on Sindri’s. Disappointment put an edge on my tongue. I had thought I might grow, might be better, might be more. ‘Tell me, Father.’ And here I used ‘Father’ as though I meant it. ‘Why doesn’t every man of consequence find himself a future-sworn seer and plan a path to glory?’

A stillness came over the man. The type of regret that cannot be manufactured. He spoke with a gentle, self-deprecating humour but I knew he spoke true. ‘To look into what will be isn’t unlike self-abuse. To watch yourself march through possibilities, to follow the truth through all those twists and turns. Just a little might stunt your growth.’ I thought of Jane, tiny and older than Gorgoth. ‘Or make you go blind.’ His cataracts seemed opalescent in the Builder light. ‘And if you look too far, if you look to see what waits for us all at the end …’

‘Tell me.’

Father Merrin shook his head. ‘It burns.’

And for an instant I glimpsed a skinless hand holding a copper box.

47

With the Pope’s corpse lying out amid the slaughter, we advanced on the emperor’s palace, a vast dome fashioned from thousands of huge sandstone blocks, fitted one to another without mortar and only gravity to hold them in place. A hundred guards from my retinue remained to stand watch over the dead whilst Captain Devers pondered his options.

‘It’s big.’ Makin’s eloquence, vanished at the city gates, had yet to return.

‘What it would be to have ridden here at the head of an army. To have a hundred thousand spears at my back. To just take it rather than to seek approval.’

None of them answered: there was only the cold tugging of the wind and the clatter of hooves on stone.

On that long slow ride across Vyene’s great square my father’s death at last caught up with me. It had been given out in dribs and drabs. A ghost displayed by the lichkin, a dream of the Tall Castle invaded, the commiserations of a cleric. Nothing as solid or as sudden as seeing him fall, looking down upon his corpse. Nothing so final or so damning as striking the blow to end him, wiping at the blood on my hands as if it might never come off.

I felt … hollow. His death had struck me as a hammer strikes a bell, and I rang with it, a broken tone speaking of broken days.

‘Nothing can be made right, Brother Makin.’

Makin looked across. Said nothing. The wisest words.

I could have fixed my hands around that old man’s throat. Choked and watched the light die from his eyes. Shouted my complaints, railed against old injustice. And it would have rung me just as hollow. Nothing would be right of it.

I ran a fingertip across the hand that held the reins, down to the scars across my wrist. ‘I could take the all-throne. The priests would write my name for the ages. But what the thorns wrote here – that’s my story – what was taken, what can’t be changed.’

Makin frowned, and still he had no answer. What answer is there?

My name for the ages? What ages? Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold had been a test, not the start, not the beginning. A test to learn from. For years Michael and those of his order had been positioning their weapons. The fires of the Builders, the poisons and the plagues. And here we were, the new men, born from ashes and cracking the world open as we played with our magic, with the toys Fexler’s kind had left us. Crack it but a little further and it would tip Michael’s hand: the ghosts of our past would rise again, bearing a final solution to all problems. And what followed me? What dogged my heels? An army of the dead, a wedge of necromancy driven after me and aimed at Vyene. A wedge big enough to split us all open. No wonder Father Merrin was blind. Our future was too bright for him. Rain fell, a cold autumn drizzle, lacking challenge. It filled my eyes. I had let the thorns hold me, taken what they offered, and lost the first of my brothers. Flesh of my flesh, his care the first duty I had set upon myself. I betrayed him and left him to die alone. And though there was no price I’d not pay to undo that wrong, even an emperor hadn’t the coin to set it right.

The palace dome, once so distant, engulfed us in its shadow. I shook off those memories, left mother, father, brother behind me in the rain.

Around the dome’s perimeter a dozen and more low entrances, slots high enough for a man on horseback, wide enough for thirty. The guards stationed themselves there as each of the Hundred arrived, their escorts breaking off to occupy the halls behind those slots. If any enemy threatened – me perhaps with my hundred thousand spears – they would sally forth to defend Congression.

Marten tapped my shoulder and pointed off west. A column of smoke rose, slanting with the wind, black smoke.

‘There are a lot of chimneys in Vyene,’ I said.

Marten swung his arm to a second column, further off, rising to join the louring cloud. I wondered if there were dead gathering at the city gates already, fresh-woken perhaps ahead of the Dead King’s advance. Even the swiftest of his main force must be a day or more away. And yet an uncommon pall of smoke hung above those distant roofs. Were the outer parts of the city aflame?

‘Maybe somebody has beaten me to it and come with an army,’ I said.

The guard stations around the palace are filled in order, the furthest from the grand entrance first. Our hundreds filed into the closest to the royal gates. It might be that the Drowned Isles delegation behind us would be the last of all the Hundred to arrive. Some have it that to be first through the Gilden Gate at Congression is to win the favour of dead emperors. The more practical suggest that it gives additional days in which to sway your fellow rulers and strengthen your faction. I say it just gives them time to grow heartily sick of the sight of you. On my previous attendance I had had to wait outside the throne room, too tainted to be admitted, and the only glimpse the Hundred had of me was of the occasional dire looks I slotted in at them through the Gilden Gate.